Alone
by KitLee
Summary: Minerva looks back on her life and the pain of being alone and traces how she got there. A little shippy-ness at the end.


Title: Alone  
  
Author name: KitLee  
  
Author email: kitlee522@yahoo.com  
  
Category: Angst  
  
Keywords: Minerva  
  
Rating: G  
  
Spoilers: none  
  
Summary: Minerva looks back on her life and the pain of being alone and traces how she got there. A little shippy-ness at the end.  
  
DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.   
  
Author notes: Due to a rather bad funk I currently find myself in, I decided to write some lovely Minerva angst. It really wrote itself, especially the last part. I'm not sure about the timeline here, and I took the liberty of messing with the ages a bit. This also does not match up with any of my other fics. Just read and enjoy and especially review.  
  
For the first eleven years of my life, nobody liked me. To this day I don't fully understand why not. I guess I was just too different then -- too out of place, too nerdy, too obsessively well-behaved and studious. Whatever the reason, I dreamed and longed for my first day at Hogwarts. I was sure that there I would fit in. There I would find friends who cared about me.  
  
Amazingly, I was right.  
  
From the beginning I had loads of friends of varying degrees of closeness. I had plenty I was very close to and even more people I could talk to and have fun with. Life seemed to be sailing beautifully for me. The first four years of Hogwarts seemed to be a collection of good conversations, jokes, laughter, interesting classes, kind professors, and those wonderful moments that are so perfect and yet so simple. Looking back I remember late night raids of the kitchen with Alli and Douglas...eating pudding at midnight just because with Ryan and Claire...dancing on the lawn in the rain...snowball fights until we all were soaked to the bone and freezing cold...sneaking to the library after midnight to return a book with Molly...all of those memories seemed so simple at the time. I grasp at the wisps that remain in my imperfect brain and inwardly cry for the loss of those friendships. And it was all my fault.  
  
Around my fifth year, I got a rather nasty crush on Patrick F. Smith. Patrick was a very cute sixth year Gryffindor, very smart and funny and very cute, with soft blond curls and deep gray eyes behind thick silver-framed glasses that perched on his slightly pudgy nose. All of my closest friends -- Molly, Alli, Claire, and Ryan -- agreed that he was very attractive. He had a sort of dreamy quality about him...after all these years I can still remember his smile and that far off look he would get when talking about a subject that particularly interested him. I solicited lectures from him on everything from literature to astronomy to potions just to hear him talk and to see that look. He was perfect in my eyes.  
  
Unfortunately, I was not perfect in his eyes. There I was -- fifteen and too tall, skinny, and flat-chested to be conventionally attractive. My straight black hair was very nice but at the time I kept it awkwardly medium length, and some part was always sticking out in the wrong direction. A few pimples spotted my face, and I had the horrible habit of biting my nails so that the ends were all ratty. My robes never fit quite right and hung wrong largely because they were hand-me-downs from my older sister Harmonia who had been much more developed at my age.  
  
Even back then I prided myself on being a practical girl, and gazing at Patrick from afar seemed too cowardly of me. I finally forced myself to ask him on a semi-date to the Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade for a butterbear one weekend. He turned me down although being Patrick he was perfectly nice about it. He didn't even stare or seem taken aback. He just paused for a moment, visibly reviewing his schedule, and then said that he was sorry but he had too much work to do to take any time off with several papers due for History of Magic and Ancient Runes.  
  
About a month later, Molly and I were walking through the corridors coming back from the library one afternoon when we heard Patrick and Alli talking. He was asking her out. And she said yes.  
  
A dull ache still fills me when I think about it. Because he didn't just ask if she would go someplace with him. Oh no. "Alli," he said, "Allie, I've had feelings for you for a while now. I, I notice you places -- but not in a stalker way of course. I just notice you, well, at meals and in Hogsmeade, and you are always so beautiful. I see you laugh, and I feel drawn to you. I was afraid of asking you out because I wasn't sure how you felt about me, but finally I had to do something. Now, I don't want to scare you off or anything. I'm not saying that I love you madly or anything. I, I just want you to give me a chance. If you don't want to, that's okay too. So, um, what do, um, what do you think?" he asked. His voice was so heartfelt that I almost melted right there. Even as my heart broke, I fell for him all over again.  
  
"Well, um, well yes," Alli said nervously. "I mean, yes, I'd love to go someplace with you. I, um, I really like you too."  
  
And that was that. On the outside I assured everyone, especially Alli, that I was over him. "It was just a silly crush, and I'm done with it," I would say flippantly. "I'm happy for you two," I would add to her, because the truth was that she and Patrick were very happy together. They married the year after she graduated from Hogwarts. He became an Auror; she working for the Ministry of Magic, and they had several lovely children together whom I eventually taught Transfiguration.  
  
There were other men after Patrick, but he was my first real heartache. After that I think I went a little insane. I became convinced that my friends were going to realize that I was a horrible person and start hating me. My sleep was filled with dreams where I had no friends, and I would wake up every morning crying, convinced that the dreams were true. I stopped talking to them and only listened with the hope that by not bothering them with my problems, they wouldn't tire of me so quickly. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe it was that my natural studiousness and tendancy to spend long hours studying in the library drove everyone away. For whatever reason I began to drift apart from them, and by seventh year I had no more close friends. After graduation I lost touch with everyone. I moved away, grew up, and eventually I found myself back at Hogwarts teaching Transfiguration. Part of me hoped that I could reclaim the happiness that I once found within these walls. To some extent, I was right.  
  
Unfortunately, history tends to repeat itself in the bad as well as the good. I find myself strongly attracted to someone even more wonderful than Patrick all those years ago. He's very smart and funny, kindly, and incredibly attractive. But this time I am cautious. I fear that the same pattern will unfold: I will ask him on a date, he will reject me, and then he will date and eventually marry my best friend Poppy. So I hold my tongue. It isn't easy, but I feel it is a necessity. Sometimes I have to physically bite my tongue to keep from asking him. I try to sit next to him at meals and listen enraptured to his lectures on the dark arts or Quidditch, his two favorite topics. Sometimes he shares amusing anecdotes from one of his classes, or something that Harry Potter did or said, whom he understandably feels avuncular or parental towards. At those times I almost melt. He's so funny and clever, and sometimes I fantasize that Harry is our child, and I can almost hear my biological clock ticking away. But I won't let it happen. I won't jeapordize what we have now for a longshot, as desired as it is.  
  
Still, alone in my room I allow myself to drift into a pleasing daydream about him, and on a spare piece of parchment as I grade the sixth year Ravenclaw's essays, I doodle a heart inscribed around the words:  
  
Remus and Minerva. 


End file.
